


When All Is Lost

by forgerofdreams



Category: Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-30
Updated: 2012-08-30
Packaged: 2017-11-13 04:31:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgerofdreams/pseuds/forgerofdreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John's first steps on the orphanage steps were just like every other step he'd ever taken in his life.<br/>Empty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When All Is Lost

John's first steps on the orphanage steps were just like every other step he'd ever taken in his life.

Empty.

He was cold.

Frozen, almost.

Tired, and alone, and ruined for innocence before he ever got a chance to live. A mother five years in the grave, a father only five days, Robin felt as if he had been dead even longer. It was a horrible feeling, he knew, this empitness that churned in his stomach, but it would be years until he fully understood it. For now. Now he was stuck somewhere in between pain and anger, his life had fell apart faster than he got a chance to hold on.

His small fingers clutching at the threads of his father’s jacket as he fell to the ground next to him. Sharp crashes that reverberated through the alleyway surrounding them, sounds he wouldn’t recognize were bullets crashing through flesh and brick until he saw the blood seeping from beneath his father’s form.

He was a troubled case. 

A child with two dead parents, perfect for the orphanage, they said. He had no other family, where else would they put him?

Given a cursory pat on the back, he’d been driven to the orphanage in the back of a squad car, his eyes tracking the skyline as they passed, blocking out the world around him as he’d done since that day he’d had to watch them wheel his mother away. He’d had five years to dull himself, numb himself as each and every verbal barb, and slap crashed through him. 

The officer had even stayed long enough to make sure the Father found him, the small child resting on the doorstep of the orphanage, laden down with things a child of his age never should’ve had to see.

The Father didn’t find him till nearly an hour later, not having moved an inch from the spot he’d been left in. The moment the older man had caught sight of Robin, standing there in the cold, he’d wrapped him up in his jacket and pulled him inside. Leaving him in the hands of the older children to bring Robin in amongst them, only….the Father seemed to have put too much faith in a child’s ability to care about a newcomer. Robin was passed around, from child to child, neither wanting to take care of the small newcomer that ended up in a corner, out of the way. 

He stayed that way, for days, huddled in a corner, eating what he could grab from the other boy’s, waiting to be noticed. Waiting to be seen by…anyone, but…why would they? No one had seen him, really seen him since his mother last looked upon him. Her smile was etched into his memory, something he clung to at night, using it to try and remember what he was there for. Why he was in this world that didn’t seem to care, that wanted to chew him up and spit him out until nothing was left.

The Father finally noticed him, a few days later, the young boy in the corner that hadn’t spoken a word to anyone in what felt like years.

It was another year or so before he would speak, his voice rough with disuse as cries of pain left him, the othe rboys imaginging he was a good target for their own feelings of pain and anger at the world. Because that’s all he was, and what he would ever be. He didn’t deserve anything different.

He was why his mother was gone, after all.

He didn’t deserve to be happy.


End file.
